Description

Bit By Bit Games is a British independent game studio founded by Matthew Hanlon and Kieran Nee in June 2011.

History

Bit By Bit Games was founded in June 2011 after first Matt and then Kieran left Lionhead Studios. After years of working with large teams on AAA games they created Bit By Bit Games with a vision to develop smaller more focused, occasionally experimental, games working with a small collaborative team.

The founders have been friends for 20 years, at school Matt coded some small games and made some short films roping in Kieran and other friends to help out and act in them. Together, at this time, they developed a rule set for a tabletop skirmish game inspired by their love of Games Workshop games. During university they were a core part of the team that developed the Quake 3 based Midget Wars for the 2002 Dare To Be Digital competition. Although the Midget Wars team missed out on the top prize they did receive the Endeavour Prize awarded to the team that made the most effort/progression over the ten weeks of the competition. More importantly, the experience proved to Matt & Kieran that making games was definitely what they wanted to do, and they have been strong advocates of Dare To Be Digital ever since.

After graduating from different computer science degrees and the same postgrad course both Matt & Kieran started work at Lionhead in July 2004. During their time at Lionhead they have worked on Black & White 2 (Matt), The Movies (Kieran), Fable 2, Fable 3, and Fable Heroes. Matt & Kieran returned to Lionhead in December 2011 to help finish Fable Heroes and contribute to some prototypes. This period of work finished in September 2012 and they returned full time to Bit By Bit Games.

After It's Tanks! was released in April 2013 Bit By Bit Games began a period of contracting for other developers. Firstly working on an unannounced project with Kinesthetic Games until April 2014. Then with JiggeryPokery on GodFinger 2 and a second unannounced iOS game for the rest of 2014. Development on MMA Manager started in February 2015.

Fable Heroes

Both Matt & Kieran worked on Fable Heroes before leaving Lionhead. The small team and fun, focused development rekindled a love of game development within them, as Matt talked about in a blog post:

“After the development of Fable 3 I was so burnt out I wasn’t sure I wanted to even make games any more, but the joy of developing Heroes reminded me why I loved making games – without Fable Heroes I doubt there would be a Bit By Bit Games.”

In late 2011 Bit By Bit Games was contracted to help complete development on Fable Heroes and continued to work there for a few months after its launch to do some prototyping work for Lionhead.